I spent the morning in the main auditorium of the university giving my address to the assembled conferees. Dagglebert, against my expressed wishes, had put together some kind of video display or slide show to accompany my introductory lecture, ‘Some Aspects of the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Sadly, even though Dagglebert has irrepressible faith in visual aids, he has absolutely no spatial awareness whatsoever. I kept looking up and realising that flow charts were running over my face, and at one stage I looked down to discover that my stomach was neatly encompassed by a Venn diagram section tagged ‘Manic Depressives in Coventry 1977–79’.
Despite these and other drawbacks, it went well. Several hundred hirsute men and women sat on the edge of their seats for a full three hours while I went over the principal aspects of the theory. If the truth be told I could have gargled and they would have been just as attentive. I’ve now reached that rarefied position in academia where I have the cachet of a lecturing Miles Davis. I could have allowed Dagglebert to project slides for three hours and then sauntered on for five minutes of disjointed and facile muttering — and still I would have been vigorously applauded.
As it was I declined to cash in on the credulousness of my audience. For once I would attempt the truth. I would take a serious stab at stopping the feverish growth of an industry I myself was responsible for helping to create. I would demystify the Quantity Theory myth, and in the process take a few clay idols down with me.
Accordingly, I dealt with the subject personally as well as historically. As with all great theories I felt that it was especially important for an academic audience to understand the personal dimension, the essential humanity of the origin of such an idea. But it didn’t work. Once one has a certain kind of academic status, any statement that you make, if it is couched in the language of your discipline, no matter how critical, how searching, is seen only as an embellishment, another layer of crystalline accretion to the stalactite. To break it off at the root, one’s language would have to be brutal, uncompromising, emotional, non-technical.
So I began by telling them of the grey cold afternoon in suburban Birmingham, when, labouring to complete the index to an American college press’s edition of my doctoral thesis, ‘Some Social Aspects of Academic Grant Application in 1970s Britain’, I was visited in one pure thought bite with the main constituents of the theory as we know it today.
At least that would be one way of looking at the experience. Seen from another angle the Quantity Theory was merely the logical conclusion of years of frustrated thinking, the butter that eventually formed after the long rhythm of churning. I have often had occasion to observe — and indeed Stacking has recently and belatedly stated the observation as a tentative syndrome which he expresses: (Á → Å). Where Å = a subsequent state of affairs— that events are reconstructed more than they are ever constructed.
Once you have published, grown old and then died, the events surrounding the original theoretical discovery with which you have been associated take on an impossible causal direction and momentum. One which certainly wasn’t apparent at the time. Scientists are particularly prone to this syndrome. For example, take Gödel and his Incompleteness. Once he had made the proposition, everything in his life had necessarily led up to that moment, that piece of work. Thus, when the infant Gödel cried in his cot, the particular twist of phlegm striations, wafted in his gullet by his bawling, implied that no logical symbolic system can construct full grounds for its own proof. Poor Gödel, his breakdowns, his anorexia, all of them inextricably bound up with his fifteen minutes of academic fame. Why?
Well, put simply, when aberrant events occur they become subject to the same principle — at the level of human, social observation — as particles do to instrumental observation at the sub-atomic level. The effect of observation has a direct impact on the nature of the event, altering its coordinates as it were, although not in any simple dimension. I mean, if an aberrant event occurs it doesn’t then occur in another place or time because of the attention it subsequently attracts. It doesn’t retroactively take up that other position or time, or even rate of occurrence before it has in fact taken place. That would be absurd.
Rather all of these: the effect of observation on aberrant events tends to be the reversal of their causality, their causal direction. However, there is no reversal of necessity as far as the occurrence of P is concerned — and I think this is something that has been ignored.
So when I ‘thought up’ the Quantity Theory of Insanity, I was in fact being caused to think it up by the subsequent fact of the general reaction that occurred: public commotion, academic furore, even a front-page paragraph in the quality press. Let me make this clearer by means of an example: with murders, to take a commonplace aberrant event, this syndrome is so obvious that it hardly arouses any comment. X commits a murder, or he apparently commits a murder. Perhaps it was a very unfortunate accident? Maybe he was arguing with Y and pushed her rather too vigorously and she tripped on the lino and dashed her brains out on the edge of the gas cooker, just like that. Furthermore, perhaps X, crazed with grief, went mad, cut up Y and buried her in the garden. Subsequently caught, X was then retrospectively branded ‘psychopathic’, by anyone and everyone who had any connection with him. ‘Oooh, yairs,’ says a neighbour, ‘the way he rattled those empty milk bottles together when he put them out on the front step, there was something demonic about it.’ X, once upstanding, loyal, prone, perhaps, to the same slight eccentricities as anyone — G, for example, although let us not bandy capitals — has been ruined, now and in the past, by the observation factor.
None of this, you can now appreciate (and perhaps always have), is by way of digression. If we are to talk meaningfully of my life, and of the part that I played in the origination of Quantity Theory, we must be able to account for observational factors — and then be able to ignore them. Ironically, given the tendency to subordinate the individual consciousness to some creative zeitgeist, I turn out to be the best possible Quantity Theory historian. After all, I was there. Which is more than can be said for Musselborough, Nantwich and the rest of those twerps.
Well, then. My own early life was fraught with neurotic illness. The debacle surrounding my analysis by Alkan is well known to the public, so there’s no point in trying to hide it. The received understanding about my background, my early life, my schooling, and indeed my undergraduate studies with Müller, is that they were all spectacularly mundane. My circumstances and character — if you listen to these biographers — had the absolute banality of a Hitler. They were so ordinary, that reading the facts on paper one could only conclude that they had been recorded as the prelude to some cautionary tale.
In this respect the ‘official version’ is wholly correct. Mine was a childhood of Terylene sheets, bunion plasters and Sunday afternoon excursions to witness the construction of Heathrow Airport. My parents were quiet people, who conspired together gently to live in a world where no one shitted, ejaculated, or killed one another violently. This upbringing left me morbidly incapable of dealing with the real world. I was appalled by my own body. The obsession I developed in my teens with the theoretical aspects of psychology was a logical path to take, it offered me a liberation from the nauseating, cloacal confines of my own skin.